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submitted 1 day ago by meldrik@lemmy.wtf to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[-] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Just saying, not my experience. I have used linux for over 25 years and nontechnical users in my family have also for almost 20 years. By in large it has worked just fine.

The big issue is Linux is not the OS that is supplied when people go to the store and buy something (well except for Android and Chromebooks which are Linux and are popular). It is also not the system or have the apps their friends use. It also does not have the huge supply, support, and word of mouth ecosystem. Buying hardware especially addons is confusing. Getting support is hard unless you have friends that use. Buying Linux preinstalled often costs more. Change too is hard and there has to be some driver and for most people there is not.

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[-] utopiah@lemmy.ml 71 points 1 day ago

Didn't watch the video... but the premise "The biggest barrier for the new Linux user isn't the installer" is exactly why Microsoft is, sadly, dominating the end-user (not servers) market.

What Microsoft managed to do with OEMs is NOT to have an installer at all! People buy (or get, via their work) a computer and... use it. There is not installation step for the vast majority of people.

I'm not saying that's good, only that strategy wise, if the single metric is adoption rate, no installer is a winning strategy.

[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 32 points 1 day ago

Most people who go out and buy a computer doesn't understand what an OS is. If Linux was standard when you bought a PC, it would be the dominating OS. I mean, you could switch the OS to Linux on the computers and I think most people wouldn't realise when they buy it lol

[-] utopiah@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 day ago

Indeed, so my argument is that sure a "better" installer might change a small fraction of the marketshare, say 1%, but it's not enough to change significantly, say 10% or even reach parity.

An interesting example is the Steam Deck coming with Linux installed. Sure there are few people who do (by choice) install Windows alongside Linux but AFAIK the vast majority do not. That's IMHO particularly interesting on a topic, gaming, where Windows has been traditionally the #1 reason people picked a specific OS.

[-] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

Doing dual install is advanced. No nontechnical user should consider it.

[-] Libra@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It's been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren't going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it's still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the 'it just works' front.

[-] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

TBH do you actually think that there's some chance that nobody is testing these releases and this is happening to a massive number of people?

I've installed linux countless times on a SHITLOAD of computers and never faced any of these problems, realistically, you're very unlucky, and these sorts of things happen with windows all the time too.

I'm not saying your issues don't matter, but unless you have statistics that back you up, you can't say "it just works" to either OS.

I've had more of an "It just works" experience with linux literally hundreds of times.

[-] Libra@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I actually think there's some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don't always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it's not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don't have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that's not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.

Don't get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it's just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than 'lol buy an AMD GPU', so the odds are pretty good that I'm not the only person in history that that has happened for. I've never had problems like this on windows, I've never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don't have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.

I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it's not just 'press button, receive OS' like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it's not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.

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[-] silentjohn@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

I looked for a reasonable Linux laptop for my wife and either it was European (large shipping costs) or ridiculously marked up.

She just went with a windows laptop 🤷‍♀️

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[-] Exec@pawb.social 7 points 1 day ago

Even then those who have to installers don't really have a good experience with distros of wide market share (narrowing to Linux distros only), especially with whatever fresh hell Calamares is. (It doesn't even support LVM or just installation with specified mounts points if you already set up your partition layout!)
Seriously, I've had better experience with the installer Ubuntu Server uses.

[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 day ago

Or users could maybe learn how to do things without having their hands held and treated like babies every step of the way; or at least how to search for information to find what they need... 🤷🏻‍♂️

[-] cerement@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 day ago

search for information when Google intentionally lies to you and hides results to keep you on their site looking at ads longer …

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[-] Libra@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

They could. But you and I both know they won't because most people don't care about anything beyond 'make the magic box work so I can do my job / play my game / etc.'

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[-] thedruid@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

Yeah I love linux, but it's user experience , while light years ahead of what I used in the late nineties and early aughts, is still clunky compared to others.

That being said, honestly most of linux's issues are GUI related, when it comes to going mainstream. The capabilities and efficiency are far ahead of windows and mac os but most users don't care.

Directions, examples and mundane work should all be seamless for mainstream consumers.

A good rule of thumb is, " if a user has to look for it to fix it, or open a terminal window to install software, then it won't be accepted fully.

Mainstream users don't want to type commands in a prompt. Why does everyone think windows blew DOS out of the water in sales? It wasn't because DOS wasn't working. It was, hell early windows ( I started on 3.11 so that's my limit of knowledge ) still used DOS.

So bottom line. Start putting the non tech consumer first or we'll forever be stuck in this "almost mainstream" category forever.

[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago

Idk mainstream users should learn to learn and empower themselves with knowledge.

The enshitification of hardware and software by constantly catering to the dumbest of people is hurting everybody.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

So bottom line. Start putting the non tech consumer first or we'll forever be stuck in this "almost mainstream" category forever.

I'm okay with that.

"Mainstream" users are getting stupider. Even Windows is to difficult for them. They want the Apple walled garden with a subscription plan for their devices and no permissions to do anything that a corporation doesn't want you to do.

Fuck. That.

[-] thedruid@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

So. We just encourage ignorance and security threats so we.. can.. be .. better than them? I don't think that's the healthiest outlook ...

[-] Broadfern@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

This exactly.

I enjoy the level of control I have on my Linux machine but I spend about 40% of my time in CLI.

I recently had to troubleshoot a windows machine, and the lack of control was frustrating but every step for that problem was GUI-centric. Everyday people don’t want to remember commands so they can set up their browser and word processor. They want (to them) simple and straightforward.

To us it’s a low bar, and most of us are from the generations that dreamt of a predominantly tech-literate society, but that’s not reality. We have to meet them where they are, and if they want to learn beyond that then we welcome them in.

[-] thedruid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Super glad you understand my point. it honestly is the one thing holding us back I believe

[-] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

is still clunky compared to others.

Wut?

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this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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